Kabila's move to M23 puts South Africa's DRC dead on the table

South Africa sent soldiers into the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to fight M23. The rebel group is blamed for the deaths of 14 South African soldiers last year. Now the former Congolese president whose government once stood alongside that mission, Joseph Kabila, has joined the same rebel movement.

That is the question Dr Claude Kaba, executive director of Southern Africa Resource Watch, was asked on eNCA’s Checkpoint podcast, published on 22 October: did Kabila betray South Africa, and should South Africans be concerned?

Kaba’s answer starts with the death sentence hanging over Kabila, imposed by the government of President Felix Tshisekedi, which he says accused the former president of treason. Kaba told the programme that a former head of state under such a sentence has his movements restricted, that Kinshasa had asked other countries to repatriate him, and that Kabila needed somewhere he could be protected. He said there had been threats on Kabila’s life, including reports of a drone sent to his house. “It became a matter of death and life,” Kaba said. “He had nothing to lose.”

Kaba described the move as a deep contradiction for a man who once fought M23, and said Kabila would have thought it through and consulted widely. He also pointed to two openings Kabila used: Tshisekedi’s attempt to change the constitution, which Kaba said was difficult for many Congolese to accept, and the country’s paralysed social and economic conditions, which he said stretch well beyond the east.

Underneath it, Kaba placed the disputed 2018 election. He said there is a story that the person declared the winner was not the one who won, and that Kabila and the electoral commission chairperson handed power to Tshisekedi. “There was a deal,” he said. “That was the seed of what we are seeing today.” Kaba argued the two men then fell out as Tshisekedi took control of state structures, including a parliament where Kabila had held a majority, and Kabila left the country, including a period in South Africa.

Asked directly whether South Africa was betrayed, Kaba did not give a flat yes. He said the concern is legitimate and that a South African citizen would feel it as a betrayal, and that Pretoria should be able to raise the question with the Congolese. He also said there is an explanation once somebody switches sides, and that the Congolese political elite’s habit of changing allegiance needs to be questioned. He noted Kabila has denied the treason charge.

On South Africa’s role, Kaba said the country understands Congo, tracing that to Nelson Mandela’s mediation between Laurent Kabila and Mobutu Sese Seko and the Sun City negotiations. But he said the Sun City process made its biggest mistake by putting power-sharing ahead of the Congolese people’s voice on sovereignty and independence. He said South Africa’s foreign policy has weakened seriously, and that it now needs to rebuild a sense of agency and stay as neutral as possible rather than play one side against another.

He was blunt about the wider record. South Africa, he said, invested heavily in Congo, backing first Kabila and then Tshisekedi, and the second intervention did not work well for the South African army. He described the DRC’s problem as threefold: institutions that have never been legitimate since independence, severe poverty, and foreign interference that feeds on both.

Kaba also questioned the silence that met Kabila’s move. He noted that Kabila had been sanctioned by the United States only months earlier, and said he doubted Kabila would have acted with such confidence alone, suggesting some level of regional, continental and international understanding, or at least tacit acceptance. He named Washington, Paris, Pretoria and the African Union as quiet.

On the ground, Kaba said both sides are preparing for war rather than talks. He said M23 has been training large numbers of young people for a march on Kinshasa, while Tshisekedi has been buying arms and bringing in mercenaries, which he said do not win wars. He warned that if dialogue does not open, a full war is possible in the medium term, with heavy consequences for Congolese civilians.

Minerals run through his account. Kaba described Congo as the world’s biggest producer of cobalt, the continent’s biggest producer of copper, and a major holder of lithium, manganese and coltan, and said competition to control those resources is what shifts alliances. He said China controls almost 80 percent of those resources, that the United States under Donald Trump is trying to reduce that dominance, and that a deal with Washington was struck on that basis. In the east, he said, the arrangement amounts to arms for minerals, with coltan extracted and sold on by Rwanda.

He was equally critical of Kinshasa’s account of its neighbours. Kaba said Uganda has a larger presence in Congo than Rwanda, that it has long extracted Congolese resources, especially gold, and that Tshisekedi is silent on Kampala while stressing Rwanda’s role in order to keep the two apart. “My suspicion is that Uganda is as much involved as Rwanda,” he said. He added that the question of the Rwandan genocide suspects said to be in the DRC needs to be settled once and for all.

His conclusion was not a call for one side to win. Kaba said both men at the centre of the fight, the president who wants to stay and change the constitution and the former president who fought him and has now joined a rebellion, are bad for Congolese people. He called for an inclusive Congolese dialogue that opens space for new leadership, and went further: an internal dialogue alone will not be enough. He wants an international conference on Congo, because in his words the country is still not economically independent.

South Africa’s own answer to the Kabila question was not part of the broadcast. The programme put the concern plainly, and Kaba agreed it should be raised. What Pretoria says to the families of the 14 soldiers is still to be heard.